I do protest, I never injured thee,But love thee better than thou canst devise,Till thou shalt know the reason of my love:And so, good Capulet,which name I tender as dearly as my own,be satisfied.

You know what happened next? Tybalt, blinded by self-righteous rage, killed innocent Mercutio. And then Romeo caught up with him later, put a sword through him and tossed him in a fountain.

And everyone lost.

Why? Because Tybalt got it into his head that the status quo could never change, that the way things were are the way things should always be. He chose to ignore everyone around him and go right on ahead hating blindly, without reason. And that person always ends up with blood on his hands.

Proposition 8 passed in California. They passed similar amendments in Arizona, Arkansas and Florida, too. The very day we finally make one large step in the direction of progress, we take what is certainly the largest step backwards I've had to witness in my lifetime. I am at a loss for (kind) words. I don't even understand how this got put in front of the voters in the first place. Do we really legislate basic human rights based on popular consensus? Last time I checked, family was a basic human right. Maybe I was wrong.

Either way, I will await the results of the court appeals that have been filed, and I will channel the excessive amount of unmitigated outrage I feel towards a 52% of Californians, Arizonas and Floridians into something tangible. If I lived in California, I could do this:

And you can bet your ass, I would be, kids in tow and all. But I don't live there, and I think part of my unbelievable levels of anger right now are coming from the feeling of helplessness, that feeling that they've got us by the balls. I hate that feeling, don't you? Well, the more I thought about, the more I realized that I could do something, that I should do something, that I HAVE to do something. So I'm doing something.

I'm boycotting California, Arizona, Arkansas and Florida.

Ultimately, what it comes down to, for me, is that these states saw fit to remove any veiled semblance of the separation of church and state. They let the mormon hierarchy the catholic hierarchy and those Focus on the Family (censored) buy their way into politics. Which is fine, if those organizations want to give up their tax exemptions and play ball, but since they want to have their cake and eat it, too, and those states let them, they can, well, they can fuck off and die for all I care.

I've been tossing this around for a few days. I felt like maybe it was just as wrong to say, "Hey! Let's punish a whole group of people for the choices of a few!" But I can't think of anything else I can do. I can write strongly worded blog entries, I can scream at the CNN website, or I can put my damn money where my mouth is. I can say No Means NO. I can tell those states, who's revenue comes primarily from tourism, that this tree hugging liberal fag-hag thinks what they've done is morally reprehensible and politically unconscionable.

So there will be no trips to Disneyland or Disneyworld for us, there will be no drives to the Grand Canyon, there will be produce bought from any of those states. I'll shop locally, I'll be happy with the little beaches I have right here. I'll keep checking this list to see if there are any specific organizations I can boycott.

I have no allusions that little old me could even put a dent in the budgets of these states, but maybe if enough of us do it, and if enough of us talk about it, and enough of us fight for it, maybe they'll notice. Maybe they'll hear us. Maybe they'll see that what they've done is wrong, that it hurts people, that it shouldn't be legal. And maybe they'll take it back. Either way, I won't have sat idle and watched my friends hurt. I'll have done something. It's like some other dirty hippie once said:

And if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking insingin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out? They may think it's anorganization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I saidfifty people a day walking in singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant andwalking out? And friends, they may thinks it's a movement.

And that's what it is.

(Photo stolen from the FlickR set of Greg Starr. I totally asked first.)